Hello,
I have tackled the task to provide a clean, slim distribution of TeX and
all. The job is almost done with the addition of John Hobby's MetaPost.
The distribution is called kerTeX, is under a BSD like licence, with no
strings attached (I mean no GPL: really free/libre).
With kerTeX, the core system (conform to the 5 Donald E. Knuth's books)
plus mpost(1), plus dvips(1), plus bibtex(1) and plus additionnal fonts is
1/100 of the TeXlive.
It's pure C89 for binaries, the scripts for label generation for
MetaPost being basic POSIX.2 Bourne Shell. In other words: it can be
compiled for almost anything and under almost anything, starting with a
wrist watch, and can install almost on the memory of a toaster.
If the cloud, the massively parallel computers, the petabytes were
justified by TeXlive, start selling the shares!